Authorized by Congress 17 years ago, the Eisenhower Memorial is still on the drawing board. Its design by “starchitect” Frank Gehry for the National Mall remains unfunded by Congress and the target of a storm of criticism.
As a presidentially appointed member of the Eisenhower Memorial Commission, Bruce Cole, senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, had a ringside seat to this saga of power, protest and politics.
Cole will come to campus Oct. 7 for his talk, “Boondoggle! The Struggle to Build the Eisenhower Memorial,” from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. in Wolstein Research Building auditorium.
He will tell the story of the Eisenhower Memorial from its inception to today and discuss the history of presidential memorialization (including Cleveland’s Garfield Memorial) and the long and convoluted process of building monuments in our nation’s capitol.
This program is co-sponsored by the Baker-Nord Center for the Humanities and the Department of Art History & Art.
It is free and open to the public, but registration is recommended at humanities.case.edu/events/cole/.